I like Europe as a whole and I love some of the individual countries. However, the future of the continent looks bleak at best from where I sit the U.S. Some countries like France and Germany are treading water OK for now but are being drug down quickly by the PIGS. I can only sit back and watch as a slow moving fiasco is growing
European Dopers, what is the mood like over there?
What is the best hope you have for the next 10 years spelled out in detail?
Do you regret some of the semi-socialist policies that are leading up to this and if so, which ones?
Do you regret the idea of he Eurozone and the Euro currency in general?
Well Europe is in major debt unlike the US in major debt the debt in Europe was being covered up and the government would not talk about this.
The high debt in Europe caused a major recession. The people to blame are the big bank and the government.
Well Europe will do some cut backs and pay of the debt and be just has strong has before. And that is what they are doing now in Europe cut backs and paying of the debt.
Is there any reason why your post’s content appears to bear so little relationship to your title? ETA: thinking about it, I guess you think that “strong economy” = “influence, and the only form of influence there is”. If that’s the case I suggest a dictionary.
Shag, I can barely answer for Spaniards, much less for Europeans. My family’s mood is “thank God I’ve got a job / damnit I went into medicine because it was a safe job and now they’ve lowered my salary / shit I should have gotten less of my pay ‘in black’ because now my benefits suck* / the copay isn’t nice but I’ll survive, but if our darling politicians manage to make the move to electronic receipts mean that I can’t get my scripts out of my region There Shall Be Blood.” I’ve seen similar feelings expressed by folks on Spanish and French media; “don’t complain, we’ve got jobs” and “‘when the crisis passes’” said with dripping irony are well in their way to becoming idioms.
… peace in the Middle East? It would be nice if people in general (and yes that includes me) could stop telling those from other countries how to govern their own country, but due to the existence of that basic human trait known as “being a busybody” I suspect that’s not going to happen. On more specific issues: in Spain we had the 40- years of The Glorious Dictatorship, which in some regions have been followed by 40- years during which some issues swung the opposite way (for example, if anybody there learned that you voted for a national-level party of any sign you would be called a fascist; if you referred to the Spanish language as español rather than the newfangled yet officialized castellano you would be called a fascist). I hope that during the next 40 years the pendulum will swing back to more moderate positions; there’s regions where the tendence has already been that for the last 10 years and others where the start of the swing has taken longer but is already visible.
What the flying fuck on a pogo stick is a “semi-socialist policy”? I hate the pork barrel policies, but those aren’t socialist even if Spain’s most famous one was set in place by our socialist party. Buying votes is a very capitalist activity.
Hell to the NO! For anybody who travels or does business with the rest of the EU, it makes things a lot easier. Then again, that was a big chunk of the reasoning behind the Treaty of Sisterhood: the Old Kingdom of Navarre already has a history of putting “let’s get rid of trade and travel barriers” ahead of flag-waving. It would be nice if we could stop pussyfooting around names, though, as IME negotiations tend to go better when people are willing to put their cards on the table - but of course this would require the opposite of a politician :rolleyes:
black = under the table. And to whomever said in another thread that “salaried employees can’t cheat on their taxes”: size=14 LOL
1.) Pretty good, in northern and northwestern Europe.
2.) The Russian market is opening up, financially if not politically or ideologically. We’re seeing increased trade of both merchandise and culture. Sometime during this century, Russia may tie inseparable trade and cultural ties to the rest of Europe, but for now I’m willing to settle for trade. Oh, and the gradual opening of the North East Sea Route (from ice) is going to really facilitate trade with the eastern Asian markets for northern and northwestern Europe..
3.) None whatsoever.
4.) No opinion on the Euro, but no regrets whatsoever on the Eurozone.
Continuing Chinese advancement at the expense of the Americans. Neither of which will have much effect on us. Fiftieth straight year of not holding most of the world in a colonial embrace.
It was the non-socialist policies that caused all the problems, the bank deregulation, the light touch approach, the low taxes on non-doms, the interest rates designed to privilege finance over manufacturing industry, the privatisation, and so on.
Well, we’re not in it. Obviously, economically, the Eurozone is too large for a single currency to be efficient or to be flexible enough to serve everyone’s interests, and was introduced explicitly to remove fiscal power from democratic influence. Much like the dollar, really.
Having fun laughing at the naïve Americans who still think they are Number One, and will continue to be, despite the manifest inability of their government to govern.
I am pretty sure that Europe is in nothing like the long-term rapid decline that America is. We had our rapid decline, and ceased to rule the world, decades ago, and have long since come to fairly comfortable terms with it. You Americans are only beginning the process. Of course it will be more painful for you unless and until you develop a proper welfare state.
I think you have misunderstood the problem quite a bit. The so-called PIGS are only about 15% of the EU economy. Their situations are also vastly different from each other, their only common issue is problems borrowing money.
Well, I live in Norway, and we have basically not noticed the economic problems of the last few years. Our economy is growing nicely, and we have almost no unemployment.
The situation is of course radically different in Greece and Spain, which are pressured to cut budgets at precisely the wrong time of the economic cycle. Any economist will tell you that this will only make the problem worse, and that it has no chance at all of actually fixing any problems. The situations in the UK and Ireland are a bit different, and the cuts they do may work better, although I’m not convinced.
That the idiotic politicians in Germany (and Finland) finally understands that the only way to save the Euro is for the whole Eurozone to take liability for all government debt. If they are unable to do that, they should just leave and go back to the Deutchmark (or Finnish Mark).
Can you explain the logical chain that made you blame the situation on “semi-socialist policies”? I can’t understand how anyone can come to that conclusion. Except for Greece, the cause is failing banks and a nervous bonds market. Although for Italy it wasn’t really the banks, but because they have lots of very old government debt (budgets have been close to balanced for quite a while).
Some of the EU countries should deregulate their employment markets a bit to decrease unemployment, but this doesn’t have much to do with the current crisis. Corruption, cronyism and tax-evasion are probably bigger problems.
Norway is not in the Eurozone and will not join in the foreseeable future, but I’d support joining it if our economies were a little bit more synchronized than they are now. Our exports are almost only oil and fish at the moment, so we go by different cycles.
Having the Euro is extremely convenient for trade and travel, and it is probably helping to increase trade between the countries a lot faster than it would without it. And increasing trade leads to evening out of the economic differences, and greater growth for all.
What the Eurozone needs to do is to regulate how individual countries can take up debt, a bit similar to how it works for the states in the US. The really big mistake they did when they created the Euro was not to set up that sensibly.
Your choice of title is a bit strange to me. “Declining influence in the world”? The nations of Europe used to rule nearly all of the world. It is a very good thing that it stopped.
The economy of the EU is larger than the US’ (17.5 vs 15 trillion USD), and the number of European traders and diplomats around the world are probably several times what the US has. I think they have plenty of influence. Military might is not the only way to get your will.
But we have to acknowledge that both Europe and the US are getting less important in the future, as China, India, Brazil and other countries are getting richer. The combined population of the US and the EU is barely a tenth of the world’s population. Why should we get to decide what happens around the world?
And “bleak future prospects”? The times aren’t very good for many Europeans at the moment, but it certainly hasn’t been good for many Americans either. There are no reasons at all why it shouldn’t be much better in a few years. Reading your OP, it almost seems like you have mixed up Europe and Cuba.
Bleak. But people feel more concerned about immediate concrete issue, like unemployment than about the declining importance of European countries. Anyway, like in the USA, I don’t think that people truly believe that they won’t be the wealthy top dogs forever.
More European integration, but that’s a pipe dream. I expect stagnation.
I don’t think that those policies led to this. I blame fiscal irresponsibility. The issues of growing deficit and debt, retirement funds, etc… has been ignored for decades (not really ignored, talked about a lot, but never addressed). Until the crisis. Now, we’re supposed to address two major issues at the same time, when solving one would require economic policies essentially opposed to those required to solve the other.
If anything, I’m more irritated by the dogma of economic liberalism prevalent during the two last decades that resulted in some spectacular failures.
To simplify a lot, I think we should have paid more taxes.
Absolutely not. We would have been worst off without the common currency. Some countries would have just collapsed economically and given the strong interdependence in Europe, the others would have been hit even more severely.
In fact the crisis led to a positive result IMO : more common rules, more tools in the ECB toolkit, etc…But too few, too late. We need more integration, not less. The Euro is a great idea. With unfortunately an half assed implementation.
Ignoring the special case of Greece it wasn’t covered up. I’ve heard about the growing deficit, the issue of retirement funds in 2020, etc… during all my adult life (and I’m 47). Every single politician has been talking about it during the 20 last years. But there has been no serious attempt to address the issue.
Frankly, the USA is destroying itself , by trying to be “world policeman”. I’m looking forward to China stepping up to the plate. I’m tired of paying the bills.
There doesn’t necessarily need to be a “Number One” in world politics. That is to say, it’s possible to not have any country or region that dominates the world. 20-30 years ago the United States definitely controlled all major international organizations, and dominated worldwide politics and diplomacy. Today we no longer do and no nation has taken our place. There is no “Number One” any more.
Frankly, the US had a long way to fall, so the bounce back has to be big too. Thus a large recovery (when compared to much of Europe) is not so impressive when you consider that the US fell further. Sitting here in Sweden, much like the chap from Norway that posted earlier, we’ve viewed the whole thing with a bit of distance. We’ve kept going, business as usual - and for a large part with a sense of self satisfaction when many implemented policies that had been developed here in the nineties after a massive economic meltdown here (which we recovered from, due to those policies).